USA TODAY Review

'Nate in Venice' is vintage Russo, but in digital-only format

It's easy, maybe even advisable, to get lost in Venice, that lovely and improbable city built on the water in Italy, with all its winding canals and alleyways.

The main character in Richard Russo's engaging 78-page novella, Nate in Venice, does just that, despite his smartphone's locator app, which he finds mystifying.

But Nate, a sixty-something American college professor, seems lost and mystified in more ways than one. Still, he's a character worth rooting for.

On the surface, Nate in Venice is a departure for Russo, who's usually identified with the settings of his novels: the struggling mill towns of upstate New York (Nobody's Fool) or Maine (Empire Falls, which won a Pulitzer in 2002).

But part of his 2007 novel, Bridge of Sighs, was set in Venice, which Russo uses again as a colorful backdrop for this novella.

Nate may be digitally challenged, but the novella is being released by Byliner, a digital-only publisher that specializes in "e-shorts," fiction and non-fiction written to be read in two hours or less.

The story, after a slow start, turns into vintage Russo. It's driven as much by its flawed and aspiring characters as its sense of place.

Nate (identified by only his first name) and his older brother, Julian, join a small group from central Massachusetts on an art tour of Venice. The brothers' rivalry is compounded by the fact that Nate's ex-fiancee is Julian's ex-wife. (A sort of ex-extended family.)

Nate, who's full of self-doubt, hides a "secret fear that he's led a life other than the one he was intended for."

Julian, who's "seldom right but never in doubt," is a salesman who boasts he can sell anything. But Nate says Julian has "only sold one thing: Julian.'"

Nate, as he confides to a woman on the tour, is a career bachelor whose "true love has always been Jane Austen."

But his love of Austen hasn't saved him from a disastrous incident with a female student a year earlier. Ultimately revealed in flashbacks, it's not what you might suspect if you've read too many campus novels. (Russo, a former professor, is sharply funny in describing Nate's students and his run-in with a dean.)

The student whom Nate harmed -- without meaning to -- could have been the one student so gifted, as Nate puts it, to justify his career. She is described this way: "Here was an intelligence that could be engaged. She wrote as if the book she was discussing mattered, as if it somehow squared with her experience of the world. Here, for want of a better word, was a voice."

That's how I felt when I finished Nate in Venice. Nate and his story matters. It's too pat to say he finds himself by the end. Let's just say he's not so lost. Or, as Russo describes it, he's "actually flirting with happiness, or if not actual happiness then its possibility." And there's a woman involved, who's not Jane Austen.

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